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The essay discusses theoretical and practical aspects of politics, war and diplomacy in late fifteenth-century Italy, using Machiavelli's works as an example of theory, Venetian foreign policy as an example of practice. The attempt to present Machiavelli as a founding father of the Realist school of International Relations is considered and dismissed. Major features of Machiavelli's thought are treated: his vision of the intimate connections between foreign affairs, war and political life; his distinguishing power from force; and his grasp of the importance of reputation. The value of these as a guide to the politics of Italy between 1454 and 1494 is assessed, with particular reference to Venice, and to the merits and defects of Machiavelli's famous comparison between ancient Rome and Venice. The career of Roberto di Sanseverino is examined to show that one premise upon which that comparison was based, that condottieri were unreliable, was sometimes well founded.

In the late nineteenth century Populism was a major feature of US politics and society. It originated as an agrarian revolt born in response to the crisis of American agriculture vis-à-vis industrialization and the opening of global markets for agricultural products. The ensuing Populist movement involved millions of farmers in the Southern and Mid-Western rural areas hit by the crisis and it spilled over into local and national elections, eventually spreading to other regions and including sections of the emerging middle class, thus posing a formidable challenge to the established two-party system. Though it ultimately failed to bring about an electoral realignment, its influence was nonetheless significant and long-lasting. The Populists instigated political and economic reforms for decades to come while actively partaking in the cultural transformations of the time. Populism, however, generated a culture that was both forward- and backward looking, and as it continued to affect politics over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, its majoritarian impulse inspired new forms of democratic inclusion as well as threats to minorities and republican institutions. This complex phenomenon and its many ramifications have engaged generations of historians, whose political sensibilities changed as events unfolded and scholarly research proceeded. At a time when Populism has once occupied center stage in America, it is worth looking back at its origins and pondering how the historiography has tried to make sense of it.

This paper analyses the connections between Bagehot's Conservative liberalism and his evolutionary conception of the English Constitution. According to Bagehot, the solidity of the British constitutional system rests on the coexistence of two factors, the «government by discussion» (for the few) and the «deference» (by the people for the elite) in the social and political life of the Country. In his essay Physics and Politics, Bagehot asserts that the poise between the principle of political freedom and that of «legality» is the result of a lucky and rare evolutionary itinerary, which has enabled England to be a solid and dominant nation. The advance of democracy in the mid Victorian period threatens to blow up the balance achieved between change and continuity. For Bagehot, the danger is that democracy risks killing a «legality» based on «deference», and that death of deference risks killing a freedom based on «government by discussion».

Although in comparison to other key Gramscian concepts, ideology has not been among the most studied, this is beginning to change. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a diffuse and variegated usage of the term in the Prison Notebooks, as well as an innovative extension of the concept, which is articulated around a network of closely correlated terms and concepts. Nevertheless, debates remain over how to understand its meaning in Gramsci's carceral discourse, with some arguing that his distinctive conception of ideology has a "neutral", and arguably, also "positive" meaning, while others contend that it is neither "neutral", nor "positive", but a critical concept. This essay argues that Gramsci's conception of ideology is neither neutral nor positive, but rather, an eminently critical and differentiated analysis of the diverse ideological forms of consciousness through which the popular masses are enveloped within the web of a class's hegemony through the mediation of the philosophers' philosophies, the fruit of his attempt to rethink philosophy politically. In short, understanding Gramsci's conception of ideology in the full sense can only be ascertained by following the threads of his philosophical investigations in their shifts and re-elaborations. Keywords: Gramsci, Politics, Philosophy, Ideology